'Last Train Home'

'Last Train Home'

Zeitgeist Films

Directed by Chinese-born Lixin Fan, "Last Train" takes its name and its overall framework from Chinese migrant workers who toil for most of the year at factories far from their home villages. They return, often by train, to see their children and parents only for the Chinese New Year. It's not a few people who return. Some 130 million annually turn that trek into what the film calls the world's largest human migration. It certainly looks that way in eye-widening shots of unimaginable hordes of people overrunning police barricades and flooding impossibly overcrowded trains. This boggling phenomenon, however, is only the backdrop against which the story of one particular family, the Zhangs, plays out. Both paradigmatic and personal, it is in one sense a particularly Chinese story, but in another it couldn't be more universal. Related: Movie review: 'Last Train Home'

Directed by Chinese-born Lixin Fan, "Last Train" takes its name and its overall framework from Chinese migrant workers who toil for most of the year at factories far from their home villages. They return, often by train, to see their children and parents only for the Chinese New Year. It's not a few people who return. Some 130 million annually turn that trek into what the film calls the world's largest human migration. It certainly looks that way in eye-widening shots of unimaginable hordes of people overrunning police barricades and flooding impossibly overcrowded trains. This boggling phenomenon, however, is only the backdrop against which the story of one particular family, the Zhangs, plays out. Both paradigmatic and personal, it is in one sense a particularly Chinese story, but in another it couldn't be more universal. Related: Movie review: 'Last Train Home' (Zeitgeist Films)

Directed by Chinese-born Lixin Fan, "Last Train" takes its name and its overall framework from Chinese migrant workers who toil for most of the year at factories far from their home villages. They return, often by train, to see their children and parents only for the Chinese New Year. It's not a few people who return. Some 130 million annually turn that trek into what the film calls the world's largest human migration. It certainly looks that way in eye-widening shots of unimaginable hordes of people overrunning police barricades and flooding impossibly overcrowded trains. This boggling phenomenon, however, is only the backdrop against which the story of one particular family, the Zhangs, plays out. Both paradigmatic and personal, it is in one sense a particularly Chinese story, but in another it couldn't be more universal. Related: Movie review: 'Last Train Home'